Wednesday, October 7, 2015

2014/2015 St George Marathon Qualifiers Breakdown

I ran the St George Marathon in 2014. The high that year was 87, low of 55 for the City of Saint George. For 2015, it looked fairly similar, slightly cooler at high of 82, low of 57. The race also started on time in 2015, versus 15 minutes late in 2014 (which means just a smidge higher temperatures at the finish). All in all, conditions were slightly better in 2015 but marginal, really. Not sure it would result in a hugely different finish times (though please feel free to chime in if you feel otherwise, that is just my conjecture).

2015 had fewer finishers. This race has a lottery, so I'm not sure if they just took fewer in the lottery, had fewer guaranteed entries and legacies, and/or fewer charity runners. It resulted in 4.8% fewer qualifiers, even though the qualifying rate is actually up by 2.3%.

AG Group

2014 AG Total

2014 Qualifiers

Percentage

2015 AG Total

2015 Qualifiers

Percentage

M1834

733

68

9.28%

712

73

10.25%

M3539

524

67

12.79%

498

68

13.65%

M4044

475

64

13.47%

452

64

14.16%

M4549

410

95

23.17%

392

66

16.84%

M5054

344

82

23.84%

338

72

21.30%

M5559

306

53

17.32%

269

48

17.84%

M6064

158

24

15.19%

158

26

16.46%

M6569

82

18

21.95%

67

13

19.40%

M7074

36

11

30.56%

26

7

26.92%

M7579

9

1

11.11%

9

3

33.33%

M80+

1

0

0.00%

2

0

0.00%

F1834

895

131

14.64%

837

127

15.17%

F3539

641

138

21.53%

571

121

21.19%

F4044

458

91

19.87%

428

87

20.33%

F4549

278

68

24.46%

299

77

25.75%

F5054

233

41

17.60%

214

58

27.10%

F5559

135

27

20.00%

114

23

20.18%

F6064

65

14

21.54%

58

11

18.97%

F6569

15

3

20.00%

18

3

16.67%

F7074

7

0

0.00%

3

1

33.33%

F7579

2

0

0.00%

0

0

0.00%

F80+

0

0

0.00%

1

0

0.00%

Totals

5807

996

15.38%

5466

948

17.68%

Because this data proved to be something that people started caring about when the figuring out where we thought the cutoff might be, I am including a breakdown of distribution across chunks of time under the standard.

Margin

2014

Percentage

2015

Percentage

<1 minute

55

5.52%

41

4.32%

1-2 minutes

55

5.52%

52

5.49%

2-3 minutes

65

6.53%

42

4.43%

3-4 minutes

42

4.22%

57

6.01%

4-5 minutes

39

3.92%

38

4.01%

5-10 minutes

206

20.68%

191

20.15%

10-20 minutes

274

27.51%

258

27.22%

20> minutes

260

26.10%

269

28.38%

Totals

996

948

The total percentage of under 5 minute qualifiers is 24.26% for 2015. 25.70% for 2014. So we are also seeing a slight shift (1.44%) over from under 5 to over 5 minutes. But this is just one race so we'll see how the distribution of margins shakes out over time.

The methodology used by Boston Qualifier Stats is slightly different than what I was envisioning. She took the number of people at BQ cutoff 2015 to project the BQ cutoff of 2016. So, if we just use the one race we have here, we would take the total of all folks with margins of 2:28 or higher in 2014, and then figure out where that cutoff would land in the 2015 results. It is the closest match the process that actually happens with Boston Marathon. And I really can't think of a route that would be more accurate.

If we just do a straight percentage on time, 4.8% off 2:28 is 7.1 seconds. 2:20

Let's see what we get for number of folks with 2:28 or better in 2014.

2014: 854 runners with 2:28 or better
2015: the 854th runner, sorting on margin descending, is a margin of 122 seconds or 2:02

Next races other than Berlin (if Berlin puts up their results in the archive, I should be able to load it up fairly easily) are Portland and Twin Cities which I anticipate taking a bit longer than St George just due to the format.